11-23-2014, 05:59 PM
$tevie wrote:
That's a pretty stupid article. FB uses algorithms for everything, this article makes it sound like they just began using them now for providing news.
People who read newspapers won't jump ship because of FB. They're jumping ship because of the entire internet, which provides news more quickly minus the ink all over your hands.
I still read newspapers but online. The idea that a person will take one newspaper and share a warm and fuzzy relationship with it it is over. Especially since so many newspapers have been sold to conglomerates and no longer have a unique local character to begin with.
The comics are too tiny to see, the local columnists who wrote those corny personal essays are dead, the little features like coloring pages or stories for kids left years ago, the weather is is hours behind our cell phones: all the things which made a newspaper a family affair are gone, I'm sorry to say it but they are going to go the way of the dinosaur unless they can undo their current status as canned national news 12 hours too late.
The people who let FB be their only news provider aren't interested in the news anyhow, so that's kind of a non-issue.
I think the main point was that people are going to be more and more likely to be fed news stories that fit their worldview and their narrow range of interests. I know that's nothing new, but oddly I thought it was you who seemed most concerned about that in the past (could have been someone else...)